Book Talk: The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway
Virginia McGee Richards
Co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of the American South
April 16 | 3:30 PM | Hitchcock Room
Ginna McGee Richards is a photographer, researcher and former environmental lawyer whose work is rooted in nature and a sense of place. Born and raised in North Carolina, she examines the contradictions embedded in southern land and culture. This intimate connection to land and history forms the foundation of her artistic practice.
Her critically acclaimed photographic series, The Inner Passage traces a largely undocumented network of 17th and 18th century canals built by Black enslaved laborers. Through years of fieldwork and archival research, she uncovered the environmental and human histories encoded in these waterways. Working with the wet-plate collodion process and a mobile darkroom in remote marshlands, Richards creates images that echo the fluid, unstable terrain they depict. “I want people to read the work as a visual poem,” she says, “to feel the land telling its own story.”
Richards’ photographs and research were featured in Smithsonian Magazine (March 2022) in the article What the Haunting ‘Inner Passage’ Represented to the Enslaved, which received the American Society of Magazine Editors’ award for excellence in print and digital journalism. Her photographic work also received the Gold Medal Prize at the Lowell Thomas Competition (March 2022) and has been exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Light Factory in Charlotte, and
the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Her work was previously highlighted in the UNC Carolina Alumni Review feature Uncharted Waters, Uncharted Ground (August 2020). Richards is currently a Photojournalism Fellow at Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado (2021–present), where she works under the mentorship of James Estrin of The New York Times and Ed Kashi. Richards lives and works in the American South.
Book Description: A deeply moving photographic and narrative history of a southern waterway that the enslaved were forced to build—but which they ultimately used as a means of escape. In this book, Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs of landscapes altered by slavery and portraits of Lowcountry descendants, along with an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage,
putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight into photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword. Together, these words and images offer a powerful living map of history.
Register now: https://go.unc.edu/Ginna